Chapter 538: Covet

At Starry Kingdom's Sword and Roses University.

Two students were engaged in a discussion.

"Doesn't she especially like those dishes? Every time I see her in the cafeteria, she always goes back for the same few."

"Sonya always eats those dishes because they are the best value for money. Since you have plenty of money to spend and don't usually eat much, you probably haven't paid much attention to the prices. Their taste, nutrition, price, and energy value are all practically impeccable. Those of us in the Swordsmanship Department often choose them, too. Sonya probably isn't short of money anymore, but she still eats the same dishes. That suggests she doesn't care much about indulging her palate."

"I see. Next question. Other than her dormitory, the training hall, the library, and the Meditation Tower, she doesn't go anywhere else regularly, right? Ever since she became a sorcerer, it seems she hasn't attended any of the social gatherings she used to go to."

When Louisa returned to the dormitory, she found Adele and Angelica earnestly discussing Sonya. She couldn't help asking, "What are you two doing?"

"Researching Sonya," Adele replied.

Louisa put her backpack on her desk and looked at them in confusion. "I know you're researching Sonya, but what exactly are you researching? Whatever you want to know, couldn't you just ask her when she gets back?"

"That won't do. I can't let the Claw-Stretching Club President know I'm researching her," Adele said solemnly. "You know... I'm doing something bad."

"You couldn't possibly do anything bad. You're not that kind of person."

Adele was deeply moved. "Louisa! I can't believe you have so much faith in my character!"

Louisa sat down. "I don't have faith in your character. I have faith in your intelligence. You gave up on cheating in the final exams because it was too much trouble. I honestly can't imagine what kind of bad thing you could come up with. The most I can picture is you buying cream puffs and using a straw to suck out all the cream before giving them to us."

Adele snorted. "Louisa, you don't know me well enough. You think I'd stop after sucking out all the cream? I'd eat the cream puffs too! The most I'd do is leave one for each of you!"

"Enough. Angelica, you explain."

"Adele's family wants her to gather information about Sonya, such as her connections, eating habits, and the places she frequents," Angelica said calmly. "In short, they want her to figure out Sonya's secrets."

Louisa stopped midway through opening her backpack. "What?"

"I can't help it," Adele complained. "I went home, and Mother dragged me into a room and started telling me how terrible things were for the family, how Father still had a chance to advance his career and rank, and all sorts of things that sounded incredibly troublesome. I finally managed to get away from all that and went to find Frey. Everything was fine at first, but while we were hugging and watching the stars, he actually started talking to me about Sonya too. Bringing up another woman on a date? Red flag!"

"The problem isn't your parents or your fiancé," Louisa said. "If I remember correctly, your father is a Shield Noble, while your fiancé's family holds the rank of Spear Noble. Your families haven't produced a Sacred Realm sorcerer in a long time. How could they possibly dare covet the secrets of one? Your family is merely acting as an intermediary. There has to be a Palace Noble behind this."

The nobles of the Starry Kingdom were collectively known as the Palace Guard Nobility, which was divided into two completely separate systems: the Palace Nobility and the Guard Nobility.

The Palace Nobility consisted of four ranks: Duke, Marquess, Count, and Viscount. The Guard Nobility, meanwhile, was divided into five classes: Armor, Bow, Spear, Shield, and Sword. The two systems differed not only in their titles but also in the positions they occupied. Members of the Court Council, Legislative Council, and Noble Council were selected exclusively from the Palace Nobility, while the vast majority of positions in the Administrative Department, such as administrative officials, law enforcement officers, and city administrators, were held by the Guard Nobility.

In simple terms, the Guard Nobility formed the kingdom's civil service, carrying out the Empress's orders, while the Palace Nobility formed the cabinet and council, serving as the Empress's advisers. It was never explicitly stated, but Palace Nobles couldn't serve as government officials, and vice versa.

If a Palace Noble truly wished to pursue a career in administration, they would have to give up their right to inherit their title and, just like a commoner, take the necessary examinations to become the lowest-ranking Sword Noble before embarking on a career in government.

Moreover, Palace titles were hereditary, but that did not mean they were immune to demotion. The Noble Council had its own complicated set of rules. Put simply, if a Palace Noble family became too useless, it would eventually be reassigned to the Guard Nobility.

Overall, the Palace Nobles ranked higher than the Guard Nobles in terms of status, but for anyone with political ambitions and a desire to wield power, the Guard Noble was the only answer.

The Shield and Spear ranks Louisa mentioned were two of the five ranks within the Guard Nobility. There was one major difference between the Guard and Palace systems: Palace Nobles were extremely difficult to promote, and families often remained at the same rank for generations. The Guard Nobility worked differently. Regardless of what rank their parents held, every new generation started as a Sword Noble.

Therefore, a Guard Noble's title did not represent their family background. It reflected only their personal standing. Within the government and legal system, promotion often meant promotion in rank. If your parents were commoners, becoming a city administrator would automatically make you an Armor Noble. Conversely, if your parents were Armor Nobles, you would still only be a Sword Noble if you were merely an ordinary staff member. The primary significance of a noble rank was the privileges it granted, the permissions it unlocked, and the benefits received after retirement.

It was easy to notice that the five Guard Noble ranks were named after weapons and armor from medieval warfare. The shield was superior to the sword, the spear stronger than the shield, the bow held an advantage over the spear, and armor was the most important of all. Adele's family held the rank of Shield Noble, while her fiancé's family held the rank of Spear Noble, making them a fairly well-matched pair.

Guard Nobles had little reason to fear demotion, but Palace Nobles were another matter entirely. The Noble Council imposed a strict requirement on them regarding the number and quality of sorcerers their families produced. Every sorcerer a family cultivated earned them a certain number of points, with different values assigned to Silver, Gold, Sacred Realm, and Legendary sorcerers. Put simply, a Duke had to produce one Sacred Realm sorcerer every thirty years to retain their title, meaning they needed a Sacred Realm in every generation. A Viscount was given a much more lenient requirement of one Sacred Realm sorcerer every 120 years, or one every four generations.

They could also offset this requirement by recruiting and supporting Sacred Realm sorcerers, but there were two problems. Firstly, Sacred Realm sorcerers could become nobles themselves, so they might not be willing to work for you. Secondly, if you wanted to recruit a Sacred Realm sorcerer, the Dukes and Marquesses would be competing for them too, and you might not win. As a result, Counts and Viscounts who knew they would eventually be demoted often chose to transfer to the Guard Nobility voluntarily rather than waste their lives in the council.

This was also why Louisa was so certain that Adele's family was merely acting as an intermediary. Guard Nobles had little desire for Sacred Realm sorcerers. Their attitude was essentially that they could live perfectly well without one. Only Palace Nobles desperately coveted the secrets behind becoming a Sacred Realm sorcerer, because those secrets could determine whether their families retained their social standing or fell from grace.

"Ah, I'm carrying burdens far beyond what someone my age should have to bear," Adele sighed dramatically. "So this is what maturity tastes like. How bitter."

"Stop pretending," Louisa walked over, gave her a chop on the head, and took her notebook to look through it. "If you posted this stuff in the Claw-Stretching Club, everyone would laugh at you. These are nothing but trivial details about Sonya! And cross this one out. Her underwear brand definitely has nothing to do with the Sacred Realm."

"Why? You can't just jump to conclusions!"

"I use the same brand as her. She's copying me."

"But your sizes—"

Smack!

Adele rubbed her aching head, snatched the notebook back, and shouted, "Then you should help us figure out what Sonya's secret is!"

"Why should I join you two in guessing..." Louisa sighed. She pulled her chair over and began analyzing the situation seriously. "The strangest thing about Sonya right now is how she managed to advance to a Three-Winged sorcerer so quickly."

"She summoned her first spirit in April, and the Meteor Calamity was only five days ago. That makes it a little over seventy days in total. If we start counting from the day she demonstrated Two-Winged combat strength in the gala, it took her only a little over twenty days to go from One-Winged to Two-Winged. In other words, she crossed the Continent of Time and climbed to the Distant Sky Domain in just fifty days.

"But the Continent of Time is different from the Sea of Knowledge. The Sea of Knowledge has the Whirlpool, which provides a shortcut. If a sorcerer's talent is extraordinary enough, they can complete the formation of their Silver Wing and advance their sorcery class rank in a short period of time. The Continent of Time has no mechanism like the Whirlpool."

"The fastest recorded breakthrough from Two-Winged to Three-Winged in the Starry Kingdom was the Hundred-Day Sacred Realm achieved by the Legendary sorcerer Max five hundred years ago. But he accomplished that only because he was proficient in mobility-based Miracles and possessed twice as much soul energy as an ordinary sorcerer. In other words, he achieved it under conditions that gave him twice the exploration time of an ordinary sorcerer."

Louisa sighed. "Not only did Sonya break his record, but she cut the time in half. It's only natural that everyone suspects she has some powerful Miracle helping her with her exploration."

The world of sorcerers had more at play than just talent.

No matter how gifted a sorcerer might be, talent could only carry them so far. It could shatter the boundaries of their sorcery class and break through the bottlenecks of advancement, but it could never bypass the hard limits imposed by mana. Mana was a fundamental constraint, one directly tied to exploration time.

Take a genius, for example. If an expedition that normally took a year could be completed by them in six months, people would simply attribute it to their extraordinary talent. If they managed to reduce that time to a hundred days, others might view them as an exceptional anomaly, but it would still be something they could reluctantly accept.

But fifty days?

Such a margin would shatter all reason. Talent could explain extraordinary results, but not something so far beyond what should have been possible. The only explanation people could arrive at was that some kind of Miracle had been involved.

"Most exploration-based Miracles either repair soul damage or mitigate the consequences of death," Angelica said after a thoughtful pause. "Looking back on the times Sonya died in the Virtual World, her recovery was always abnormally fast."

Louisa nodded. "I had my suspicions back then, but I never imagined she was concealing such a powerful trump card. To condense Gold Wing in fifty days, she would need either a Miracle that allows safe and rapid passage through the Virtual World, or a method to accelerate mana absorption. Either possibility would be enough to drive the Palace Nobles into a frenzy."

Some might wonder why saving time mattered even if condensing Gold Wing took only four to five years. Would saving those years somehow let them break through their sorcery classes and reach the Sacred Realm?

This brought to light an aspect of humanity which people often overlooked: a golden window for learning. Between the ages of twenty and thirty, a sorcerer's mind and body operated at their absolute peak for making breakthroughs. The earlier someone condensed their Gold Wing, the more mana they could accumulate to train their spirit, drastically raising their chances of advancing their sorcery classes.

Furthermore, the penalty for dying in the Virtual World was far more damaging than it appeared on the surface. While it did not leave a sorcerer physically crippled, it severely impaired their ability to focus on honing their skills.

Even if a sorcerer died only three or four times a year, a frequency most would consider relatively low, they would still spend nearly half of their prime years recovering. Before they realized it, their golden decade would have slipped away. This was precisely why Palace Noble families possessing exploration-based Miracles produced Sacred Realm sorcerers at a rate far beyond ordinary families. They could bypass, or at the very least drastically reduce, the penalties of death.

Now that a suspected Miracle capable of accelerating mana accumulation had surfaced, the Palace Nobles naturally set their sights on it, resorting to every means at their disposal to uncover its secret. The problem was...

"No matter how badly those people want it, the most they can do is pressure Adele's family to force her into digging up Sonya's secrets," Angelica said with a small smile. "Fortunately, Sonya is already strong enough to protect her own secrets."

If Sonya were still a Two-Winged sorcerer, even if the nobles across Starry Kingdom couldn't break the law, they still had ways to manipulate someone at that level. Adele's parents were the prime examples. They were both Two-Winged sorcerers and government officials, and now they were faced with pressure they couldn't refuse.

The problem was that Sonya was already a Sacred Realm sorcerer.

Even if she had yet to construct her Sacred Realm, reaching that point was only a matter of time. Once a sorcerer reached that mastery, they stood on an entirely different level—one where the methods normally used to control or pressure others no longer held any meaning.

"True," Louisa murmured, lowering her gaze slightly. "She really is in a league of her own now."

"Hey, hey! Aren't you guys supposed to be helping me? Come on, hurry up and help me think of something else to write so I can turn in this assignment!" Adele muttered, gnawing on the end of her pen.

"Adele, why are you so unfazed by all this?"

"Unfazed about what? If I really didn't care, I'd be lying in bed right now binge-watching Didarose's new drama."

"I mean, you don't seem stressed about being caught right in the middle between your family and Sonya," Louisa pointed out. "On one hand, you have zero intention of digging up Sonya's real secrets for them. On the other, you're just putting on a lazy act to string your family along. Honestly, I expected you to either be desperately snooping on Sonya's privacy behind the scenes, or crying yourself to sleep over being bullied by your family."

"Because stressing over it won't change anything, it'll just ruin my mood to binge-watch my shows," Adele said. "Besides, I couldn't dig up her secrets even if I wanted to. My spying skills are so pathetic Sonya would spot me in a second.

"As for feeling pressured by my family... okay, maybe I'm a little hurt. I finally came home for a visit, and my parents and Frey both expect me to betray a friend. But Sonya is my friend, not theirs, so it's natural they'd ask. Besides, they're still my loving parents, and my fiancé grew up right beside me since we were kids. A quick sulk is all it takes for me to get over it."

"Besides, they know what I'm like. If there were any other way around this, they wouldn't have dumped it on me. They must be dealing with pressures I don't even know about to resort to leaning on their cutest daughter and fiancée. How could I possibly stay mad at them?

"That's why I've got to write this report properly. That way I can hand in my homework, and they can hand in theirs."

Louisa shot a look at Angelica. Angelica merely shrugged and went right back to helping Adele with her assignment.

No wonder the notoriously aloof Angelica actually agreed to help...

"Still, you're hopeless," Louisa remarked. "If Sonya ever found out what you're up to, heaven knows how she'd torment you. Remember last time you grabbed her wooden sword to mess around with it? You screamed loud enough to rattle the entire building."

Adele pressed her palms together in a desperate plea. "Please don't bring that up, Louisa! Angelica already promised she wouldn't say a word!"

Louisa didn't disturb them and instead returned to tidying up her room. She hadn't been back in days, and a thin layer of dust had already settled over her desk.

Following the conclusion of the intercollegiate league, Sword and Roses University granted a five-day break, which was immediately followed by two months of Sorcerer Independent Training Period, or more simply, summer vacation. Students could choose to train at home or return to campus; naturally, anyone with even a shred of ambition chose the latter, as domestic facilities simply couldn't compare to the university's professional training environment.

As for Adele, her return was a mix of half-hearted evasion and outright compulsion. No matter where she was, she would just binge-watch shows anyway, and her bed at home was unquestionably more comfortable than a dorm mattress.

Louisa, on the other hand, was originally supposed to stay home, having already lined up a busy calendar of social gatherings for the summer. But after being provoked by Sonya and Angelica, she felt a renewed drive to chase her dream of becoming a Water Class sorcerer.

Besides, she had another, more pressing reason for coming back.

As the luminaries sank into the western horizon, Adele finally put down her pen and stretched luxuriously. "I'm so exhausted!"

Angelica glanced at her. "I've been doing all the heavy lifting with the talking. What on earth are you tired from?"

"Writing is exhausting in its own right!" Adele stood up and announced, "Time for dinner! Hey, Lou, are we hitting the cafeteria tonight, or going out?"

"You two go ahead," Louisa said, keeping her eyes fixed on her book. "I ate a bit too much at home, so I need to watch my weight. I'll just stick to some fruit tonight."

"Honestly, I think you need to eat more. Otherwise, you'll never catch up to Sonya. I mean, in terms of scale, ow! Hey, you missed! Quick, Angelica, let's run!"

Angelica cast a quiet glance at Louisa before turning to follow the fleeing Adele out the door.